Last summer in the Boston suburb of Milton, Mass, thousands turned up at a local hospital to view an image of Mary in a window. An estimated 25,000 people, inevitably joined by morning talk show crews, jammed the hospital parking lot one weekend to catch a glimpse of Mary in flowing garments and with arms outstretched like a giant Catholic Mass card. The crowds became so overwhelming that hospital administrators covered the window with a tarp to dissuade the milling hordes from blocking access to the hospital. The tarp was eventually drawn back between the hours of 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. as a concession to the gawkers.
Interestingly, the hospital didn't take a firm position in regard to the phenomenon itself. While explaining that the image was the product of chemicals mixing with condensation, the hospital's official statement added, "If there is a special message, it is believed by many that the purpose is to affirm the charitable mission of Milton Hospital to continue to serve the sick." This was more generous even than the Catholic archdiocese in Boston, which denied that the image had any supernatural origins.
Most Americans equate visions of the Blessed Virgin with sightings of the UFO variety, or with fairy tales rooted in myths from long ago and far away: the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico seen by a 16th century Aztec peasant, or the healing grotto in Lourdes, France where Mary is said to have appeared 18 times to a young girl, Bernadette Soubirous, in 1858. But Marian visions are at a historic high, and though some occur in exotic sounding places like Medjugorje in the former Yugoslavia, they happen more often and closer to home than we might think. Johann G. Roten, a priest of the Society of Mary and Director of the Marian Library at the University of Dayton, estimates that there are half a dozen reports of sightings every week. "Not all of them authentic," he quickly adds.
In the past 100 years, alone, Roten says, there have been between 380 and 400 apparitions that have attracted attention and scrutiny at regional, national or international levels, with the Roman Catholic Church looking into about 75 or 80 and recognizing a handful. At the regional level, you might have something like the Milton event, which attracts participants for a short period of time. Other sightings sustain a national buzz for years. In Conyers, Georgia, the Blessed Mother reportedly appeared to housewife and mother Nancy Fowler monthly from 1990 until 1993, and then annually until 1998. Then there are international phenomena, like that of Medjugorje, where a group of children first saw Mary in a light-gray robe standing on a cloud in 1981, and have been seeing and speaking with her daily ever since. The small Croatian-speaking village (now in Bosnia-Herzegovinia) still attracts millions of pilgrims from all over the world every year.
The trick, of course, is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Because the vast majority of Mary-sighters are Catholics, and because of the Church's official devotion to Mary, the Vatican is the ultimate arbiter of the veracity of the visions. The Church stresses that extreme care should be taken to discriminate between bona fide religious experiences and inauthentic claims. The Church's method has traditionally been fairly hands off. It prefers, says Roten, to "let the phenomenon take its course, observe it over a period time, give it leeway.to see how it plays out."
